2a) What proportion of the world's literate
population can read one of
the six official languages of the United Nations (ar, en, es, fr, ru,
zh)?
2b) What proportion of the world's literate population can read one of
ar, de, en, es, fr, pt, ru, zh?
2c-f) What proportion of the world's literate population can read one
of a list of [15, 30, 100, 200] languages chosen so as to maximize the
answer to this question?
These seem like even simpler questions (except the last part of 2,
which has a difficult optimization problem contained in it). I hope
someone can answer them.
You probably need to specify what do you mean by "can read". Say in
Wikipedia Babel language proficiency level terms, if somebody "can read"
English - do you require for the question 2 en-1, en-2, or en-3 level?
My guess would be that with en-3 to a good approximation it is the same
percentage as calculated from the number of native speakers of these
languages; for en-2 and en-1 it could make a difference.
Cheers,
Yaroslav